The primitive family in its origin and development / by C.N. Starcke.

  • Carl Nicolai Starcke
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The primitive family in its origin and development / by C.N. Starcke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and customs, recorded in writing; (4) ancient myths and legends, and archeological remains, by means of which we may reconstruct periods of which we have no direct observation. It is also absolutely necessary to be acquainted with psychology, in order not to be misled by deceptive appearance. It must be taken for granted that we are not, in this case, bound to prove the trust- worthiness of our material. Such proof, which is very difficult, must be assumed to have been given elsewhere. We must now subjoin the following fundamental con- siderations. In order to become acquainted with the development of a given community, we can desire no better material than the reports of its condition at different times, as they have come down to us. In fact, however, this mode of establishing laws, or general rules of develop- ment, is only possible to a limited extent. For the most part we are without the means of constructing such abstractions as are necessary to establish laws, since the material is far from being sufiicient to entitle us to draw conclusions with respect to the non-existence of negative instances. There are comparatively few communities of which we possess sufficient records, and these moreover only include a limited portion of the life of the com- munity in question; we must remain absolutely ignorant of the long pre-historic period. We may indeed admit the possibility of discovering an apparent solidarity in the social development. For we may become acquainted with the primitive condition and earliest development of a community by means of the report of another com- munity of higher civilization, which goes back to the period in which the former had its origin. Yet this solidarity is only apparent. No primitive community can be carefully observed for any length of time by a civilized community without being piaced in such re- lations to the latter as to modify it in many ways, so as to affect its actual development in a way which will not
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